Go to Running the Hexcrawl

The Thracian Hexcrawl was an open table I ran using the original 1974 edition of D&D. The example below is an abbreviated, annotated record of actual play from that campaign, which I’ve adapted slightly to be consistent with the mechanics and procedures detailed in 5E Hexcrawls.

BEGINNING THE SESSION

As the players arrive, I pull their character sheets out of the appropriate folder. Since this is an open table, the players may be choosing which of their active PCs they’re going to be playing. (After which, I’ll return the other characters to the folder.)

In my Thracian Hexcrawl, two things happen at this point:

1. I make a rumor check for each primary PC (not for hirelings; although it’s possible for a hireling to be the vector by which a PC hears the rumor). There’s a 1 in 3 chance for each PC that they’ll receive a rumor. If they do, I roll on the rumor table.
2. I make a morale check for each hireling employed by the active PCs. On a success, the hireling continues adventuring with their employer. On a failure, I use a system based on the OD&D reaction table to determine the hireling’s action: They might automatically leave the PC’s service or demand an additional bonus of some variable amount. (Usually nothing happens, because the players have learned to keep the morale of their hirelings high.)
3. I make a check to potentially generate new hirelings who are available for hire in the home base.

Based on these checks, and their outcomes, I update the campaign status sheet appropriately.

While I’m doing this, the players are generally getting prepared for the adventure. This may be creating new characters if they’re needed. For established characters, it includes:

1. Discussing what their expedition is going to be.
2. Buying equipment.
3. Hiring hirelings.
4. Any other business they might need to attend to while in town.

The players may, of course, have questions for me while they’re doing this. It’s generally pretty easy to juggle their requests while simultaneously taking care of my bookkeeping.

STARTING OUT

While the players are wrapping things up, I’ll grab my 6d8 and roll them. This represents a full day’s worth of encounter checks (since there are six watches in a day). By reading the dice left-to-right as they fall, I can rapidly determine which watches in the day have an encounter. Since I don’t know yet where the PCs will be on those days, I can’t generate the specific encounters (which are region-dependent), but I can use my worksheet to jot down the Day/Watch when encounters will be happening. By generating three or four days worth of encounter checks up front, I can simplify my workflow once the PCs hit the road.

Note: If I do, in fact, know that the PCs are going to be heading in a particular direction and will likely be traveling through a given region for a lengthy period of time, I can also go ahead and generate full encounters at this point.

In this case, the PCs are in the city of Maernath, located in Hex O6. Maernath is an old city-state in the setting. It was here long before the Duchy of Thracia began pushing east in recent years (establishing the Keep on the Borderlands and the logging village of Caerdheim to the south) and the City Fathers occasionally chaff against the “authority” of the newcomers. Although the early adventures of the PCs were based primarily out of Caerdheim (which was near the Caverns of Thracia), an increase in interest in the Palace of Red Death to the north led to an increased number of expeditions being mounted from Maernath. Those expeditions resulted in various PCs gaining a lot of lore about the area surrounding Maernath and that, in turn, spurred even more expeditions there.

The PCs leave town along the road heading south. They choose to travel at normal pace. Because they’re following a Road/Trail through Plains hex, their movement modifier is x1, which means they move at their normal expedition speed of 12 miles per watch. (We’re not using the advanced rules for determining expedition speed based on the speed of the expedition’s slowest member.)

Maernath’s position in Hex O6 is biased, so it only takes 4 progress to exit the hex in this direction. They’re aiming for the river, which is on the road right at the border of the hex (so they obviously have no difficulty finding it).

Their goal is to follow the river into the Old Forest (Hex P7), so now I’m going to look ahead: Their course along the river takes them through the near side of the hex (6 miles away) into Hex P6 and, from there, they will then pass through another near side into Hex P7 (another 6 miles). Although they’ve left the road, they’re still traveling through Plains and the river provides enough of a track that they’re still traveling at 12 miles per watch. Total it up:

4 miles (Maernath to River/Hex O7) + 6 miles (O7 to P6) + 6 miles (P6 to P7) = 16 miles

Which means they’ll arrive at the edge of the Old Forest a little over an hour into their second watch. This is notable because, looking at my worksheet, I can see that the second watch of the day has a wandering encounter (I rolled 1 on the 1d8 when making the encounter check). I can determine the time in a watch by rolling 1d8. The result is a 3, which basically means the encounter is scheduled to take place just as they’re reaching the edge of the Old Forest.

This is a border hex, and I’ve listed a 50% chance of border encounters for the Old Forest. So even though we’re still in the Plains, there’s a 50% chance that I’ll roll an Old Forest encounter instead.

1. I roll a 13, so that’s exactly what’s going to happen.
2. I flip to the Old Forest encounter table and roll. The result I get is “Slimes,” which has a sub-table which generates Gray Ooze.
3. Gray Ooze has a 25% chance of being a Tracks encounter, but I roll 46 (so it’s not).

They have no chance of being a Lair encounter, so I can skip that step.

Given the confluence of factors involved, I’m going to have the Gray Oozes appear just as the river passes beneath the boughs of the Old Forest. They’ll be draped across the tree branches above the river like some kind of horrific Spanish moss.

INTO THE OLD FOREST

After the PCs have dealt with (or avoided) the Gray Oozes, they’ll be able to continue along the river. It’s a Medium Forest and the trail has disappeared, so their speed is going to drop by ½. They had 8 miles of movement left in their second watch, so they’ll be able to gain 4 progress through Hex P7.

Three miles along the river, however, they come to a tree on the south bank of the river with the Dwarven letter “mu” carved into its trunk. They’re familiar with it. In fact, one of the PCs left it here as a marker: Gordur, a powerful orc stronghold, lies several miles due south from this spot.

This, however, is not their goal. They continue along the river for another mile and then make camp for the night. The next day, they continue another two miles until they find a similar tree with the Dwarven letter “thod” carved into it. This marker was place due north of the Crypt of Luan Phien. The crypt is their ultimate goal, so now they turn south, away from the clear navigational landmark of the river, and into the depths of the Old Forest.

At this point, they need to start making navigation checks. Epicaste, a hireling rescued by the dwarf Aeng from a thousand-year slumber in the Caverns of Thracia, is the group’s navigator, so she steps forward and takes point.

1. It’s a Medium Forest, so the Navigation DC is 16.
2. Epicaste blows the check. (Possibly because Delmhurst, another hireling, keeps second-guessing her.) I roll 1d10 to determine the group’s veer. With a roll of 8, I determine that they’re veering to the right. Instead of heading due south into Hex P8 (which is where they want to go), they’re going to end up southwest in Hex O8.

LOST IN THE OLD FOREST

When does that actually happen? Well, they entered Hex P7 from due north. Whether they’re leaving into Hex P8 or Hex O8, they’re still existing through the far side of the hex. So they need to rack up 12 progress to exit the hex.

• They’d gained 4 progress in the hex during their second watch. They don’t want to do a forced march, so they stop traveling after the second watch.
• During the first watch of the next day (their third watch of travel overall), they’ll gain another 6 progress. That’s a total of 10 progress, which is not quite enough.
• Therefore, they’ll enter Hex O8 about midway through the second watch of their second day of travel.

Checking my worksheet, I can see that I generated a location encounter for the second watch of the second day, so once again I generate a random time and determine that they’ll encounter the hex’s keyed location AFTER they’ve entered Hex O8. (If the encounter had happened earlier, it would have been with the keyed location in Hex P7.)

I flip to the key for Hex O8:

Me: Towards the waning hours of the day, you enter a small clearing. Criss-crossing branches grow into what appear to be houses with walls of woven moss.

Aeng: I don’t remember this.

Delmhurst: I think the thousand-year dummy has gotten us lost again.

It turns out the strange houses are empty and abandoned. It’s getting late in the day, so the PCs decide to make camp here for the night. They’ll try to backtrack the trail the next day and figure out where they made the wrong turn.

And that’s basically all there is to it. With a strong key and a clean procedure, the hexcrawl will flow naturally in response to the explorations of the PCs, drawing them deeper and deeper into the mysteries of the wilderness.

Next: Example of Play – Avernian Hexcrawl

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This will be a detailed look at the actual process of running a hexcrawl at the gaming table: How I organize my tools, what I’m thinking about during the game, the decisions I make (and why I make them), how I play with and exploit the tools, and so forth.

I’m not entirely sure how useful this will be, but I’m hoping it will provide some useful insight and practical advice into using 5E Hexcrawls.

THE FOUR DOCUMENTS

What I’ve found over the years is that no two campaigns ever use exactly the same methods of documentation, but when I’m running a hexcrawl I generally find that I’m maintaining four “documents”:

• THE HEX MAP. Printed off on a single 8.5” x 11” piece of paper that I can lay flat on the table in front of me.
• THE BINDER. This contains the campaign key. It includes background information (historical epochs, current civilizations, custom terrain types, environmental conditions, etc.), random encounter tables, and the hex key.
• THE FOLDER. Each document in this folder details a single location. As described in Designing the Hexcrawl, any location that requires more than a single page to describe gets bumped out of the hex key and placed in its own document. (This keeps the hex key clean and easy to use; it also makes it easier to organize and use these larger adventures.) Each adventure location is labeled with and sorted by its hex number for easy access when needed.
• CAMPAIGN STATUS SHEET. This document is updated and reprinted for each session. It’s responsible for keeping the campaign in motion. In my Thracian Hexcrawl, for example, the campaign status sheet included: A list of current events in Caerdheim and Maernath (the two cities serving as home base for the PCs); a list of empty complexes (which I reference when I make a once-per-session check to see if they’ve been reinhabited); the current rumor table; details about the various businesses being run by the PCs; and the master loyalty/morale table for PC hirelings. I talk about campaign status sheets in more detail over here.

STATUS QUO PREP

The heart of the hexcrawl, of course, is the hex key itself (along with the folder of detailed locations). And because the promise of the hexcrawl is that the PCs can go anywhere they want, it takes a lot of front-loaded prep to get this material ready for the first session of play.

The up-side, though, is that once all that prep is finished, a hexcrawl campaign based around wilderness exploration becomes incredibly prep-light: I typically spend no more than 10-15 minutes getting ready for each session, because all I’m really doing is jotting down a few notes to keep my documentation up to date with what happened in the last session.

What makes this work is that the content of each hex is designed in a state of “status quo” until the PCs touch it. Once the PCs start touching stuff, of course, the ripples can start spreading very fast and very far. However, in the absence of continued PC interaction, things in the campaign world will generally trend back towards a new status quo.

This status quo method generally only works if you have robust, default structures for delivering scenario hooks. In the case of the hexcrawl, of course, I do: Both the rumor tables and the hexcrawl structure itself will drive PCs towards new scenarios. (If all else fails in a hexcrawl, of course, the PCs can always choose a direction and start walking to find something interesting to do.)

The advantage of the status quo method is that it minimizes the amount of work you have to do as a GM. (Keeping 100+ hexes up in the air and active at all times would require a ridiculous amount of effort.) It also minimizes the amount of prep work which is wasted. (If you’re constantly generating background events that the PCs are unaware of and not interacting with, that’s all wasted effort.)

In practical terms, it means that you prep for each session consists of “touching base” on a half dozen or perhaps a dozen “active” hexes. That might mean:

• Updating the adversary roster
• Updating the key to reflect PC actions (although if you keep good notes during play, this is often perfunctory)
• Repopulating an empty location (using your random encounter tables or following your inspiration)

In addition to whatever tasks are necessary around the PCs’ home base.

A key thing to keep in mind throughout this process is that “status quo” doesn’t mean “boring.” It also doesn’t mean that literally nothing is happening at a given location. For example, the status quo for a camp of goblin slavers isn’t “the goblins all sit around.” The status quo is that there’s a steady flow of slaves passing through the camp and being sold.

For a deeper discussion of this, check out Status Quo Design.

SETUP

An hour or so before the game is scheduled to start, I’ll set up the table.

I sit at one end of a long dining room table. I place a TV tray to the left of my chair and another TV tray to the right of my chair. Then I pull out the box that I keep all my hexcrawl material in.

On the TV tray to my right, I place the Binder that contains the campaign key and the Folder that contains the documents detailing individual locations.

There’s a second folder that contains my GM Screen. I use a moduler screen, that allows me to insert reference sheets. (The reference sheets consist of the watch checklist and all supporting material, like terrain modifiers.) This folder also contains several copies of my GM Hexcrawl Worksheet, and I pull one of those out and place it on the table in front of me.

I remove the Hex Map from the binder and also place that on the table in front of me.

Next, the Rulebooks. I place those on the TV tray to my left. If I have additional copies for the players, I’ll place those in the middle of the table.

I also have a folder of Player Supplies, which are also placed in the middle of the table:

• Blank paper (including graph paper and hex paper)
• Blank character sheets (for an open table; I’ll also remove these once we start playing to reduce clutter)
• Communal maps (which have been drawn by the players and shared with the group)

Also in the campaign box are the Characters. I have a folder for living characters in the campaign and another folder for dead characters. These stay in the box: I generally don’t need to reference them during play, so it’s best to keep them out of the way.

I print out a copy of the Campaign Status Sheet for the current session and also place it on the table in front of me.

Finally, I’ll grab my dice bag and lay out the Dice I need: 2d4, 8d6, 6d8, 2d10, 2d12, 6d20.

• 8d6 for fireballs and lightning bolts.
• 6d8 so that I can roll an entire day’s worth of encounter checks in a single go.
• 6d20 because I can simultaneously roll an entire mob’s attack rolls. (These are generally in three pairs of matching colors, so that I can easily group them for mixed types.)

(See Random GM Tip: Fistfuls of Dice for more advice on rolling and reading lots of dice at the same time.)

Next: Example of Play – Thracian Hexcrawl

Go to Part 1

#5. IMPROVISED RANDOM GENERATORS

Okay, we started by filling the map with every ounce of creative thought we had. Then we started recklessly stealing everything we could lay our hands on. But we’re still staring at empty hexes. Now what?

Now we need to get our creative juices flowing again by rapidly injecting fresh ideas that will break us out of the dried-out box our thinking is currently trapped in. There are a lot of ways to provide this stimuli.

For example, I’ve used Magic the Gathering cards to provide inspiration. In fact, you can use the MTGRANDOM website to generate a random Magic card. Let’s do that a few times and see what we get:

(click for large image)

So what I’m seeing here are some incredibly creepy constructs. Let’s say there’s a bunch of them. They’re harvesting spores from a crop of strange flowers that blossomed in the wake of an meteorite falling to earth. How do these constructs work? Well, looks like brains are being sucked out of people and placed into the constructs. Obviously Kjora there is in charge of the whole operation.

Combine that basic set up with an appropriate map from Dyson Logos and you should be good to go.

Alternatively, grab a random map from Dyson Logos first and then use the Goblin Ampersand to help you figure out what’s happening there by flipping to two random pages in the Monster Manual.

Another option is to repurpose random encounter generators. Sadly, this is a tool lacking in 5^th Edition, but older editions include comprehensive generators that can be used (and a variety third-party options can be found).

For example, using the generators found in the 1^st Edition of AD&D:

1. Roll 1d8 to determine a column on the “Sub-Arctic Conditions” encounter table. I roll a 6, so the result is “Mountains.”
2. Roll 1d100 with a result of 65. That’s a giant owl. According to the 1^st Edition Monster Manual, giant owls appear in groups of 1d4+1. I roll and generate a group of five owls.
3. Giant owls have a treasure type of “Q x 5, X.” I roll on those treasure tables and I get 1 miscellaneous magic, 1 potion, and 1 gem. Rolling on the sub-tables, I get a black pearl (500 gp), a potion of human control, and an amulet of life protection.

Okay, the hex I’m looking at is in the Old Forest, so let’s try something like this:

N7 – TREE OF THE ELDER OWL

A giant tree, over 80 feet wide at its base and towering several hundred feet in the air. Around the base of the tree are a number of strange carvings, intermixed with primitive pictures of owls.

CALL OF THE OWL: Anyone performing an owl call near the base of the tree will cause a hidden door to open, allowing passage into the hollow center of the trunk.

COUNCIL OF OWLS: Within the tree, four giant owls sit on perches. For an appropriate tribute, these owls can each cast augury once per day.

UPPER EYRIE: For a much larger tribute, the Council will have the supplicant remove their arms and armor. Then one of the owls will clutch them by the shoulders and fly them to the upper eyrie where they will be placed before the Elder Owl.

THE ELDER OWL: The left eye of the Elder Owl has been replaced with a black pearl (500 gp) and he wears an amulet of life protection. The Elder Owl will answer questions as per a commune spell, but he is also completely enamored with physical beauty: If someone of particular beauty (Charisma 16+) presents themselves, he will use his potion of human control in an attempt to enslave them.

#6. SPIN-OFFS

Regardless of how you’re stocking a hex, you should keep your mind open to other locations that the current hex suggests.

For example, you’ve got a necromancer in a crystalline spire who’s served by a bunch of goblins he’s charmed by writing arcane runes on the insides of their eyelids and then sewing their eyelids shut. Where’d he get the goblins from? Maybe there’s a village of them living nearby. They protect a tree that bears a single, bright red fruit each year. The fruit has magical properties and each year the necromancer comes to claim the fruit and take away goblin slaves.

Or you’re keying a grotto that a bunch of bandits are using as a hideout. Turns out these bandits have longbows of remarkably high quality. This is because they’re trading with a one-eyed troll who lives in a cave that can only be accessed through a green crystal which thrusts up through the forest floor: Lay your hand upon the crystal, say the magic password, and the crystal becomes intangible. The troll is a master bowyer.

#7. WALK AWAY

Finally, be willing to walk away from the project and take a break: Watch a TV show. Read a book. Flip through some unrelated game manuals. Power up the PS5.

Give your brain a chance to breathe and your creative batteries a chance to recharge.

This is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a comprehensive catalog or definitive technique for keying a hexcrawl. It’s just stuff that’s worked for me while keying hexcrawls.

Back to 5E Hexcrawls

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 27C: The Saint of Chaos

Now that the half-orc was more of a curiosity than a threat, the crowd that had been scattering in a rapid retreat instead began to draw closer. But just as it seemed as if they had successfully calmed the situation, another man suddenly grabbed at his eyes. Bolts of blue lightning shot out of them, striking several people in the crowd. The thick stench of ozone filled the air. At least a half dozen people collapsed.

Panic erupted once again. In the midst of it, Tee was suddenly struck by the sight of a dark-cloaked man striding boldly down the street and seemingly oblivious to the chaos around him…

Crowds.

In an urban campaign, you find them cropping up all the time:

• on the street
• in a busy market
• at the local tavern
• storming the necromancer’s castle with pitchforks

Handling dozens or hundreds (or thousands) of NPCs individually would, obviously, be a hilariously bad idea. So you generally want to figure out some way of handling the entire crowd as a single entity.

Often, of course, a crowd is just part of the set dressing: You’re in a shopping mall and it’s filled with people. That’s pretty straightforward. At most you’ll want to think about what effect the crowd might have on the actions of the PCs and significant NPCs in the scene. (For example, the PCs might need to make a DC 10 Dexterity (Acrobatics) check to race through a thick crowd; on a failure, the crowd is treated as difficult terrain for them.)

But sometimes the Green Goblin comes swooping in on his glider and starts throwing pumpkin bombs around. Now combat has broken out and the crowd is panicked.

What often seems to happen is that the crowd is described as running and shouting (while having little or no effect on how things play out), and then they completely clear out as quickly as possible to simplify things even more.

But where’s the fun in that?

When I was preparing the riot scene in Session 4 of the campaign, I prepped a full set of rules for handling crowds and mobs in D&D 3^rd Edition. After some refinements from playtesting them, I posted them here on the Alexandrian way back in 2007.

Those rules are useful (with advanced options that help when the crowd is the focal point of the scene), and you could use them as a basic structure for fashioning similar rules in other games:

• What is the effect of moving through a crowd? (A moving crowd?)
• What happens when a crowd panics?
• How can the PCs manipulate crowds?
• What happens when the crowd turns into a mob? (i.e., a crowd that can take focused violent action, whether directed or random)

If you want to keep it simpler, though, I have a few quick rules of thumb for handling crowds.

First, give the crowd some basic characteristics so that it “exists” in the scene. I recommend:

• Making the crowd difficult terrain (or whatever the local equivalent is in your current RPG). As mentioned above, let the PCs make an Acrobatics check as part of movement to ignore this (by deftly weaving through the crowd).
• Having the crowd offer cover to anyone in it.

Design Note: These two factors have a nice balancing effect — the cover encourages a character to move into a crowd; the difficult terrain imposes a cost for doing so.

Second, put the crowd on your initiative list. In D&D, I like putting them at initiative count 10 (so that PCs might go before or after the crowd, depending on their initiative check). This is, if nothing else, a great way to make sure you don’t forget to include the crowd in the scene.

Whenever the crowd’s initiative count comes up, the crowd does something. This might be:

• Just a colorful description (which will help make sure that the crowd is a consistent part of the scene and doesn’t get forgotten about or glossed over).
• A bystander in the crowd being placed in jeopardy.
• A random character needs to make a saving throw or take damage.
• Make a saving throw or get knocked down.
• The crowd moves.

And so forth.

Make sure to have the crowd affect (or potentially affect) both NPCs and PCs.

Third, create a short list of crowd actions. These work like legendary actions in D&D 5^th Edition: The crowd has actions or reactions they take after another character’s action, and they can take X of them per round. (Let’s say three, by default.) The things they can do will be similar:

• Knocking people down
• Interfering with attacks (the jostle the archer’s arm, inflicting disadvantage on the attack roll)
• Making an attack against a character
• Moving

Et cetera.

Keep in mind that the crowd is not a bad guy, so these actions are a choice you’re making as the GM to model the crowd’s behavior. This also means that some crowd actions might actually be detrimental to the crowd. For example, a crowd reaction might be “1d6 bystanders get caught in the crossfire.”

NEXT:
Campaign Journal: Session 27D – Running the Campaign: Trigger & Stitch
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index